Can Occupy Wall Street Make Sense of Itself?

The Occupy Wall Street protests have been notable for their inchoate nature as much as anything else. At its root, OWS’s brotherhood of anger largely comprises rebels without a cause and is punctuated by those either young enough to lament that they missed the Woodstock generation by a long shot, or old enough to regret that the naive political ideas of their time never came to fruition.

Try as they might, neither the OWS leaders (sorry, quasi-autonomous horizontal change facilitators) nor the mainstream media can develop a compelling or coherent narrative. Still, that hasn’t stopped them from trying. Here are some of the best attempts to thread a sense of coherence through a movement which simply hasn’t exhibited any, and to accord the patina of respectability to a group that has very little in common with itself: